What a wild ride David Giannini and his parallel presence, Nunc, have taken us on! I’m knocked over at how wonderful Booth of Sighs is, how it is bizarre and yet makes sense. There’s a great sense of tension (or maybe just anticipation) reading, as I found myself wondering, I can’t wait to find out what Nunc has to say next. It has great energy because of that sense of never quite knowing where it will go next, and what words and images will startle and delight as we turn the page. There’s a strong sense of structure and movement; I felt as if I were reading one story, and the shape of it all came together in the last few works, as we return to the poet in “All Your Life So Far.” It’s like you’re being taken on a trip into a part of the world (of life? Of death?) that people don’t normally get to see, with Nunc as your guide. In a way it had me thinking of Dante, and I can’t tell you the last time I thought of Dante. . .
     I love the way it begins, with the poet’s question, and we move through memory and imagination and then into some deeper logic (don’t know if “logic” is the right word but it feels right to me). The way of looking at the past as a pile of dead days; that incredible last line in “The Start of Anything”; the “enigmatic massacre”; Piggly Wiggly and blinks and the spider and on and on. There’s just so much to love in every page, the language and images and the way it all fits together in a way that has a logic all its own. And the nod to some of Giannini's books in “All I know is that they were and are of faces somewhere wild, porous borders, span of thread and rim; and the future only rattles when you pick it up.”
     I just think it’s so fresh and original and bizarre and delightful, and at the same time, it doesn’t at any point fall into that trap of bizarre for bizarre’s sake. Every surprising word or image that pops up is, first of all, a word or image that no one would have predicted would appear at that moment, and second of all, somehow (whether it could be explained or not) feels absolutely right. This is very exciting stuff.
Mark Farrington, author of Loss of Life